Poetry and Animals, by Onno Oerlemans (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

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n 1936 the scholar Elizabeth Atkins published an article in PMLA called “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry.” In her essay Atkins presents evidence that “in American poetry written since the World War, one of the most significant new developments is now seen to be the fascination which animal life holds for the poet.” She notes that in the literary journals she surveyed over a period of fifteen years, 236 poets had published “earnest and philosophical poems about animals,” and that these poems present “intimate portraiture . . . with fidelity of detail worthy of the old Dutch portrait painters.” In contrast to the depictions of animals in poetry of the Victorian and romantic periods, she argues, this new animal poetry is “carefully literal.” With copious references to poets and poems, Atkins argues that poetry about “literal” (as opposed to allegorical) animals is a genuinely new phenomenon. She offers several reasons for the rise of this new kind of animal poetry: the Darwinian revolution and the awareness it brings of the evolutionary kinship between humans and animals; the influence of Emily Dickinson; that most readers of poetry live in cities and so feel the absence of actual animals in their lives; that World War I and the new science of psychoanalysis have offered plentiful evidence of a “sick civilization,” which spurs a turn to the “soundness in the primitive life of the beasts”; and that human interest in animals is in any case “immemorial.” Echoing a

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Shelleyan notion of the relationship between poetry and intellectual progress in society, Atkins insists that this new animal poetry simultaneously reflects and anticipates a more general cultural awareness of the significance of animals. So too Atkins’s article impressively anticipates the recent rise of animal-oriented criticism, which is also a response to the Darwinian revelation of our evolutionary kinship with animals.1 There is a paradox revealed in the essay—that although animals have been curious to us beyond the myriad ways in which we have used them, their own interests and actual nature have always been marginal and unrecognized. Our awareness of animals is simultaneously bound by human history and culture and outside of that history and culture, which is true too of animals themselves. Yet there may now be something new under the sun. That animal studies is now truly interdisciplinary—and includes history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, rather than being only a relatively lowly branch within biology and psychology—means that there is a growing cultural awareness of what animals mean, of what the animal as a concept means, and that animals have some form of inalienable value to and for themselves. Recent developments in evolutionary psychology have contributed to this growing awareness as well, helping to narrow the seemingly unbridgeable gap between human and nonhuman versions of sentience. As Susan McHugh argues in a much more recent PLMA article, “Animal studies researchers are united by a commitment not so much to common methods or politics as to the broader goal of bringing the intellectual histories and values of species under scrutiny.”2 As Atkins helps us to see, this new academic culture is late on the scene, though it is no doubt driven by many of the reasons she identifies as giving rise to a new kind of poetry about animals.

In addition to the belated recognition by literary scholars of Charles Darwin’s key insights, we might also see a more general crisis as motivating this renewed critical interest in the animal: that the news from the animal world is alarmingly bad. Animal populations are under extraordinary threat all over our planet. Habitat destruction, climate change, poaching, and hunting have dramatically accelerated the rate at which many animal populations are shrinking, and at which species

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of all kinds of life other than human are becoming extinct (between one thousand and twenty thousand times the rate of “natural” extinctions).

The biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that half of the animal species currently in existence will be extinct by 2100, and predictions for ocean life are even more dire.3 About sixty billion land animals are killed every year for food, in addition to equally vast numbers of marine animals (most of which are merely “bycatch”). Multiple studies have documented the collapse of fish stocks the world over.4 In virtually all respects, then, the lives of animals on the planet are getting worse. Pets are the only animal category that continues to expand (in every sense), though as John Berger noted in his famous essay “Why Look at Animals,” this is hardly reassuring.5 It is an open question whether keeping pets expands, contracts, or does nothing to our collective concern for the larger animal world.

The growing awareness of these crises is no doubt spurring the development of a truly engaged discipline of animal studies, which will make this, as ethologist Marc Bekoff has argued, the “century of the animal,” or at least the century of nostalgia for the animal.6 Scholars are now exploring the animal and actual animals in nature and culture, history, philosophy, art, and literature. Yet poetry about animals has received scant attention, both since Atkins identified the burgeoning field and since the rise of animal studies. For instance, at the 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society: Minding Animals, in Newcastle, Australia, only one session out of about a hundred was on poetry, whereas there were at least a dozen sessions on the representation of animals in novels and film. Equally telling, an essay by Teresa Mangum surveying “animal genres in literature and the arts” argues that the representation of animals in literature “cannot escape the binary opposition that separates humans from non-human animals” because writers and animals are “penned in by the conventions of character and plot that organize genres,” as though all literary genres are reducible to, or entirely structured by, narrative and the creation of characters.7 The excellent book Creaturely Poetics, by Anat Pick, briefly refers to a single poem, its real focus being film and prose.8 A May 2009 special PMLA issue on animal studies included only one article on

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poetry.9 As Marjorie Garber wonders, even in J. M. Coetzee’s powerful The Lives of Animals, a text that continues to reverberate in the realm of literary animal studies, and in which “the debate about the ‘lives of animals’ [is] clearly staged as a debate between poetry and philosophy . . . , why does philosophy seem so clearly to dominate, if not to win?”10 Although Elizabeth Costello argues in her fictional lectures for the superiority of poetry over philosophy as a mode of representing and approaching animals, Costello herself actually engages in philosophical discourse, just as Coetzee engages in prose fiction.

The relative scarcity of critical engagement with poetry in animal studies is striking because the trend that Atkins identified between the World Wars has continued; the twentieth century features an extraordinary number of poems about animals. Animal poems are not a minor or perhaps somewhat embarrassing occasion for verse but a significant and consistent topic in poetry. Virtually all of the poets included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (to pick one not entirely arbitrary form of sampling) have written poems about animals. In fact, as David Perkins has shown, the rate at which such poems were written began to increase dramatically during the romantic period, corresponding to the rise of the interest in animal welfare during the same period.11 My own efforts at surveying and collecting what I simply refer to as “animal poems” have left me feeling like a biologist in a rainforest, where every inquiry reveals unexpected and overwhelming riches, new creatures and species at every turn. It is hard to find a poet who has not written some poems on animals, and many poets, including many great ones, have written substantial numbers of such poems. Many commonly anthologized poems are centrally about animals, such as “As I Ebbed on the Ocean of Life,” “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Fish,” “Hurt Hawks,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Skunk Hour,” “The Snake,” “Song of Myself,” and “Two Look at Two.” And there are a surprising number of poets for whom animal poems are a central part of their oeuvre, such as Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and James Wright; and more recently, Margaret Atwood, Russell Edson, Maxine

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Kumin, Sarah Lindsay, Don McKay, Pattiann Rogers, Charles Simic, and Robert Wrigley.

The absence of sustained critical attention on poetry about animals is worth pondering. One of the contributions of animal studies generally has been to reveal how human culture has imagined and constructed boundaries between the human and the animal, even as we have shared the planet with animals and built industries, nations, and empires by defining, killing, and exploiting them. As Cary Wolfe has shown, redefining these boundaries has played a significant role in enabling various kinds of racism and imperialism.12 In other words, a conception of the human as opposed to the nonhuman, and thus the very definition of the animal, is at or near the center of conceptions of power. As Nicole Shukin argues: “Discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the species divide. That is, they hinge on the zoo-ontological production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals.”13 In the modes of representation she examines (advertisements, images, and movies) we see animals as victims of the human will to power. Both Wolfe and Shukin note how frequently animals are represented and that this representation is largely a way of rendering animals as consumable or otherwise marginal. Because nonhuman animals are virtually without power within human culture, they are destroyed in such vast numbers, and their future is so grim, it stands to reason that culture represents them as objects and as radically other. Cause and effect are ineluctable here.

The literary critic Marian Scholtmeijer made a similar point in the early 1990s, noting that in modern fiction animals are consistently represented as victims, as essentially lacking any power of their own: “Almost nothing remains to animals that has not been constrained, pruned, injured, or eradicated by humankind.”14 In this broad cultural context, poetry barely registers and has thus been largely ignored within animal studies. As W. H. Auden wrote, overstating the case somewhat, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”15 Though it is absurd to say so, poetry appears to make even less happen today.

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Culturally, poetry occupies a shrinking proportion of the consumption of the written word. With the notable exception of hip-hop, poetry remains relatively invisible. In the realm of cultural theory, which has had a seminal influence upon animal studies, poetry is unimportant both because it now seems so marginal (and thus barely even a part of culture) and because the concept of the literary, of which poetry is probably its most definitive mode, is considered a form that enables distinction and hierarchy: that it is, in a word, elitist. Though most cultural theory is explicitly post-Marxist, it still conceives of literature as part of a largely impersonal system of production, creating and representing modes of power.

So too the category of poetry (which is highly malleable) has come under suspicion in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, most influentially in the New Historicist critique of the romantic lyric. This critique argues that romantic desires for self-definition expressed in the lyric mode are naïve and idealistic, actively suppressing the broadly material forces that structure history and culture. Although there is obviously much poetry then and now that is not in the form of the romantic lyric, the influence of the form has been profound enough that it is possible to think of all poetry as at best irrelevant—fiddling while Rome burns or animals are slaughtered—and at worst guilty of being complicit with totalizing forms of power. An important component of the distrust of poetry in the realm of animal studies is a general suspicion of subjectivity, consciousness, and conscience. Materialist critics conceive of subjectivity as the illusion of self-autonomy, rationality, control, and individual choice epitomized, for instance, in the work of Wordsworth. While many contemporary poets (especially those of the Language school) actively resist this conception of what poetry can be, poetry in the minds of many critics and readers is still largely understood to be the most subjective and spontaneous kind of representation.

Subjective responses, moreover, seem in the minds of such critics to lead inevitably to anthropomorphism, in which any presence of the animal is elided in favor of an anthropocentric conception of being.

In contrast to this flattened and deprecatory view of poetry, I subscribe to Williams Carlos Williams’s idea that while it is difficult to get

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the news from poems, men (and animals) die miserably every day for lack of what is found there: insight, meaning, and an awareness of complexity and of things otherwise inexpressible. Regardless of poetry’s effects on the broader culture, as a discourse poetry is highly flexible, varied, productive, and complex. It can produce unique meanings and insights that question and challenge dominant modes of thinking. In contrast to much criticism, poetry does more to bring a reader back to the physical world and actual animals. Poetry also provides plentiful evidence against the notion that the present moment always possesses both the most self-awareness of the forces that drive history and the least ability to resist them. My survey of poetry about animals over the past couple of centuries has revealed a history in which humans have always had complex ideas about animals and their relations to them, ranging from loathing to love, fear to fascination—the animal as both beast and companion, human and nonhuman. Signal evidence of this is also found in the earliest art of all cultures: the stunning cave paintings of Chauvet; the complex relations between humans and animals represented by Homer, Chaucer, and the author of Beowulf; and aboriginal art the world over.

As Jacques Derrida, at least, is unembarrassed to admit, our interest in animals, both abstract (as objects of our various kinds of discourse) and in our daily lives, has its origin in a moment of ethical awareness that is not purely rational, critical, or theoretical but open and reflective.

This awareness occurs in moments of recognition, such as when an individual person looks at an individual animal and perhaps has the gaze returned. I think poetry can speak to and amplify this kind of awareness as well or better than any other mode of discourse, because it enables a version of Keats’s negative capability that is fundamental to exploring the similarities and differences between humans and other animals. As Derrida says, somewhat cryptically, “Thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. It is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking.”16 He means many things here: in part that philosophy, like cultural studies, must attempt a definition of the animal, engage the animal

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as a concept, and remain relatively abstract. Poetry has the potential of engaging the physical being, the individual creature. It can originate in direct experience and emotion, retain mystery, and blur boundaries.

Interestingly, many recent critics have argued for the special ability of poetry to generate ecological awareness more generally. For instance, Jonathan Bate suggests that inherent in poetry is a desire or force that turns our gaze outward, to the earth: “Poesis in the sense of versemaking is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself—a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat—is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself.”17 Bate makes the extraordinary claim that the poet could be “a keystone subspecies of Homo Sapiens . . . , potentially the saviour of ecosystems,”18 because poetry is uniquely capable of revealing and producing how we dwell in the land. So too Angus Fletcher finds in a distinctive mode of American poetry the ability both to dissolve seemingly entrenched binaries and to create a new awareness of environment as a place actively inhabited by the self of the poet and his or her readers. The “environment-poem,” as he calls it, “does not merely suggest or indicate an environment as part of its thematic meaning, but actually gets the reader to enter into the poem as if it were the reader’s environment of living.”19 Poetry does not escape the world or reify individual being so much as depend upon a poet’s desire to become aware of her many entanglements with others and, through careful description, with the world at large. However, Fletcher makes no allowance for poetry to bridge the gap between human and animal.

Indeed, when he reads a poem about an animal (John Clare’s “Mouse’s Nest”), he sees it as descriptive of the poet’s connection to landscape rather than to another sentient being. So too Bate allows that ecopoesis might “engage imaginatively with the non-human” but does little to develop the idea.20 Leonard Scigaj’s account of the work of “sustainable poetry” similarly focuses on poetry that “treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating cycling feedback systems,” but this focus on vaguely defined systems apparently leaves little room for the sentient beings who live in them.21

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Poetry is a means of encountering, investigating, and representing animals that is especially capable of mediating and altering the way we think about them. Poems about animals do many things: they bring animals to our attention; they give various kinds of meaning to animals; they bring animals into the realm of human culture, even high culture; they transform nonhuman animals into human symbols; and they allow us to imagine modes of animal being, to attempt to cross, blur, and reimagine the problematic human-animal divide. Indeed, given that philosophy has traditionally understood an essential part of its own purpose as defining the human against notions of the animal and thereby solidifying hierarchies, poetry can help us with new ways of imagining human and animal relatedness. Poetry allows for experimentation and diversity, play and openness to the new. Because language and symbol making are at the center of historic definitions of human being, poetry’s experimentation with language and symbols allows for a broad range of ways of representing, thinking about, imagining, and encountering animals.

This power of poetry is theorized in Susan Stewart’s fine book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Though Stewart is not specifically concerned with poetry about animals, she argues that poetry is centrally “an anthropomorphic project” in the sense that it is a way of overcoming the profoundly solipsistic nature of individual existence. Though we often regard poetry as effete and ethereal, Stewart argues that it is in fact an expression of fundamental physical desires: for survival, communication, and beauty. “As metered language, language that retains and projects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence.” Herself an accomplished poet, Stewart understands poetry to involve a sensual use of language, connecting us to our own physical existence, as well as allowing us to reach out, to imagine and communicate with others. Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of animals, she argues that “the sense perception of animals is the basis of the link between their own particularity as organisms and the life of the species through reproduction, and it is as well the ground for their desire for an objective being, an other, by means of which such

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reproduction will take place.” The urge to know the world, to know the other through our senses, and to leave a record of it (to reproduce) is central to our animal being. Producing poems is an expression of this reproductive desire, much as song is for many birds. It is anthropomorphic in that it is necessarily bound by our human senses and language and the desire and experience of the individual poet. It is always personal, of the poet. Yet Stewart sees that poems are also a record of a desire to reach beyond self: “The semantic dimension of poetry is an open unfolding one, stemming from both composition and reception. No poetic utterance is absorbed by its context or completed in its use. . . .

The poet speaks to another in such a way as to make the communication intelligible to more than one person. The communication is not simply intimate: it is constitutive of the social, mutual, intersubjective ground of intimacy itself. It is the kind of thing one knows that others say when they are face-to-face.” Stewart’s account of the full meaning of a poem includes the community of readers, of which nonhuman animals can never be a part. But animals can be included in the community that poets themselves recognize and help to forge. Stewart notes that poems have mimicked animal calls and so become signs of the desires for spontaneity, authenticity, and beauty that animals often embody for us.

Animal play and animal faces (often reproduced in the form of masks) have suggested modes for poetry, ways of becoming other and connecting to the world.22 Although Stewart points to an inherently anthropomorphic quality of poetry (and language), poetry as a whole produces no particular ideology or approach to animals. In the helpful terms suggested by Matthew Calarco in representing and understanding animals, poets may be focused on identity, difference, or indistinction. That is, they may highlight ways in which we are like animals, and they like us; they may foreground and celebrate animal (and species) difference; and they may dwell on “a space in which supposedly insuperable distinctions between human beings and animals fall into a radical indistinction and where the human-animal distinction (in both its classical and more complicated deconstructive form) no longer serves as a guardrail for thought and practice.”23 Poetry in general can do all these things; individual

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poems, as I will show, may align with any of these strategies and sometimes all of them at once. My general argument is that poetry’s inherent playfulness, its resistance to rules and codes, its openness, allows it to break out of ideologies and categories, to be at once anthropomorphic and antianthropocentric.

R My ambition is to produce here a field guide of poetry about animals, which is both an overview and a sampling, one that begins to account for the variety of work poetry can do for and about animals and our interests in them. The only other full-length study that attempts to do this is Randy Malamud’s Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. Noting the absence of serious analysis of poetry about animals, Malamud usefully surveys the work of several well-known twentieth-century American poets. The book is somewhat limited, however, in its scope and in its evaluative schema. Malamud’s activist mode of criticism foregrounds the ability of art to represent animals respectfully, allowing animals in one way or another to be “present.” For Malamud, bad poems about animals (which he sees as legion) are actually about humans, accepting Calarco’s claim that any degree of anthropomorphism is a kind of failure.24 He thus dismisses all first-person lyric poems as guilty of foregrounding the human over the animal. Good poems are those few that make explicit their inevitable failure to represent the animal. Moreover, Malamud ignores matters of form. Indeed, Malamud is not really interested in poetry as a specific mode of writing, but simply as one more mode of mimesis, as though the purpose of all art about animals should always be to make the animal present. This is a simplistic ethics posing as a kind of aesthetic. Thus, although he admires Marianne Moore’s poetry because it presents “a panorama of animals and animal experience,” he also complains that her poems are “choppy and difficult; it’s not the form I would have chosen for such outstanding poetic animals. . . .

The important thing about style for my purposes here is that it not overwhelm the spirit of these works. . . . Ideally, the imaginative texts that springboard readers to a range of metaphorical relationships with

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animals would be unencumbered by any stylistic mediation at all, eliminating the need to ‘psych out’ and come to terms with the language, the imagery, the voice.” A work of literary criticism that depicts the act of reading and interpretation as a “psych out” cannot take us far.25 Much more interesting is the kind of animal-oriented criticism exemplified by Dan Wylie. In his essay on southern African elephant poems, he remains deeply attentive to matters of poetic form, giving precise readings of how these poems question “the conventional linguistic boundaries of division . . . [while] at the same time, such poems do not deny human culture.”26 He argues that the power of this poetry lies in its ambiguity and openness, rather than in the impossible ideal of mimetic clarity, in taking “full advantage of the possibilities of language to bridge and embody both anthropocentric and biocentric meanings.”27 He forcefully notes that while it is obviously impossible for any kind of writing to escape the bounds of human perception and culture, it is still possible for poetry to “negotiate the borderlands between interspecies subjectivity and exteriorized observation.”28 The broadest way of stating the work that poetry can do is suggested by the philosopher Dale Jamieson, who has written extensively on our ability to understand and represent animal cognition. Knowing, encountering, and assessing all modes of mental being, Jamieson argues, including those of nonhuman animals, other people, and even our own consciousness, is always a matter of interpretation, of making sense of multiple sources of information, gaps, and ambiguities. Because the process of understanding the mental life of other creatures is broadly similar, there can be a “deep connection between what an organism thinks and what thoughts an interpreter would attribute to the organism.”29 The case I am making abstractly here, and through the poems I examine throughout the book, is that poetry explicitly and forcefully allows us to engage in this kind of interpretation about animals. Especially since the romantic period, one of the functions of poetry has been to engage in precisely this kind of interpretation—formulating the meaning of one’s own experience, and understanding that of others,

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particularly in poems of encounter. Broadening the scope of the other to include nonhuman animals has been a part of the evolution of poetry, as we shall see in chapter 1.

The poems Wylie analyzes are those he has collected about elephants in southern Africa, part of a larger project on how elephants are understood and reflected in different aspects of southern African culture and in different modes of discourse. Malamud, on the other hand, examines the work of poets whom he feels offer a sufficient degree of respect to animals. The divergent strategies of Wylie and Malamud raise the interesting question of how, if one wants to consider the specific abilities of poetry to mediate animal being to human culture, to define the field and select examples? In addition to Wylie and Malamud, there is also a long, though somewhat thin, history of critical analysis of specific poets who have written poetry about animals (such as Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore), but such criticism tends to interpret these poems in narrow and conventional (which is to say biographical and anthropocentric) ways. What I aim for is a broad analysis, a sizing up of what the constraints and processes of poetry can bring to the fraught relationship between human and animal. That is, we need an analysis of poetry about animals from the general perspective of animal studies, which can scrutinize and document our construction of ideas of the nonhuman animal, how these constructions have served conceptions of the human, and how something of the actual creaturely reality of the sentient beings that inhabit the planet might be found in or rescued from these cultural constructions.

R Coetzee, in The Lives of Animals, makes the strongest case yet for the ability of poems to mediate our understanding of the animal. Although, as I suggest earlier, the debate that Coetzee stages between philosophy and poetry is destabilized by the complexity of its own form,30 its central character, Elizabeth Costello, in her second lecture offers a fragmentary argument for how poetry provides a profound means of engaging

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and representing animals, a claim consistent with what Coetzee has written in other places. Costello’s argument is presented explicitly as a fragment, its introduction cut short by the fact that the novella’s actual protagonist (Costello’s son), who relates events from his perspective, arrives at his mother’s lecture at least half an hour late. Elizabeth Costello has begun her lecture by identifying “that kind of poetry [in which] animals stand for human qualities,” which is to say, poetry that is not about animals but uses them allegorically to represent entirely human concerns.31 The difficulty of actually identifying or defining poems only seemingly about animals is suggested by the fact that Costello never attempts to do so. Nonetheless, Costello opposes allegorical poetry to two poems by Ted Hughes, which she suggests represent what poetry at its best can do for animals.

The first poem she discusses, which the narrator explains is in a handout passed around in the lecture, but which Coetzee himself does not reproduce in his text, is Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar,” which I quote here in full: The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigue with indolence, tiger and lion Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom— The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

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By the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear— He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.32

This is a fascinating poem, considerably more complex than Costello’s brief account of its effect suggests. Costello argues that the poem, “by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and that no one ever will . . . , shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we recollect it afterwards in tranquility, we are for a brief while the jaguar. He ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us.”33 Costello, a novelist who is engaging in philosophy, is certainly too quick to dismiss the long history of explanations of “poetic invention” and its effects. The response to the poem that Costello suggests refers only to its final ten lines, in which the pacing jaguar is described as somehow indifferent to being caged because of the sheer force of its desire to hunt. “There’s no cage to him” because his instincts, “the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear,” appear to blind him to his confinement. That a reader can imagine the physical being of the jaguar (as Costello says, “bring the living body into being within ourselves”) results from the poem’s reduction of the animal’s ability to perceive and understand its actual situation, and from the wonderful lines at the end of the poem that create a forceful sense of the cat’s pacing, heightened by the contrast to the other inert animals of the zoo. The poem describes a relatively complex approach to the jaguar, an encounter made to seem objective by the absence of an explicit narrator of the description. Like the crowd in the poem, the reader is inexorably led past the other caged animals to the pacing jaguar. The sudden insight the poem gives of the individual jaguar’s sheer independence is also an assertion of an idea of animal being: that its predatory instinct overpowers its awareness of its immediate environment. It is also possible,

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however, to read the poem and its description of the jaguar as a revealing misreading of the animal. That the omniscient speaker interprets the jaguar’s pacing as reflecting indifference or virtual escape rather than stress and unhappiness (which is more plausible) suggests his belief in the relative unconsciousness of the animal, the primacy of its instinct over its immediate awareness of its surroundings.

Regardless of how one interprets the behavior of the jaguar, Costello is right that the poem presents an encounter with an actual animal rather than something obviously symbolic, conceptual, or otherwise artificial, even if the poem is also attempting to capture something seemingly essential about the species. Hughes’s poem makes us feel the jaguar’s presence and its otherness, the reality of its energy, the power of its pacing. We recognize that the jaguar is contained and partially diminished by the artifice of the zoo, and also by that of the poem, a meaning subtly echoed by and felt through the poem’s loose iambic pentameter (a rhythm of natural energy and containment). The poem approaches the animal and leaves a remainder, a mystery about the animal rather than about the perceiver. The poem explicitly reveals that part of our interest in large, sentient animals is a desire to engage them, to have them present behavior that demands interpretation.

Again like the crowd in the poem, the reader is forced to recognize that she wants to know what the jaguar is sensing. The poem offers itself as a dramatization of such an interpretation. The poise and economy of the poem, moreover, is at once a statement about the confidence and fullness of the interpretation and that it is an act of the imagination, a surmise, a creation.

Costello’s arguments about animal being and against philosophy are consistent with Coetzee’s other writing, in which the distinctions between human and nonhuman animals are frequently blurred. He achieves this not by humanizing animals through careful depictions of their behavior, or attempts to imagine their subjective existence, but rather by de-idealizing human conceptions of our own nonanimality.

People, in Coetzee’s novels, are revealed to be a lot less conscious and rational, and more driven by physical desires and needs, than they imagine themselves to be.34 So too Elizabeth Costello argues that reason is

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“neither the being of the universe nor the being of God . . . [but rather] the being of one tendency in human thought.” And in what many readers take to be the central point of her argument about our ability to know the lives of animals, she says: “To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive in the world.”35 For Coetzee and Costello, this is the large common ground between humans and other sentient creatures—not the elimination of mental existence but a conception of awareness as largely occupied by the physical sensation of existence, rather than the more abstract and disembodied notions of reason and, perhaps, self-consciousness (though one could argue that self-consciousness also involves a keen awareness of one’s body). Because we are ourselves embodied animals, imagining this form of sentience is within the reach of our sympathetic imagination. It is the ability of Hughes’s poetry to reflect and produce an awareness of creaturely sensation that Costello celebrates in her account of his poetry.

For Costello, poetry about animals can speak beyond the constraints of reason, of what we can absolutely know. It is a spur to the imagination, and implicitly also to sympathy. But of course not all poems that represent animals do this. As Costello notes, there are kinds of animal poetry. Indeed, in one of the most idealistic moments of her argument she states that a poem that is serious about approaching and imagining the actual animal will inevitably resist notions of kind or species: “It has to be that way. Jaguars in general, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of a jaguar, will fail to move [the poet] because we cannot experience abstractions.”36 The jaguar experiences only its own existence; it can’t know its own jaguarness, just as the poet can only see actual individual jaguars, or other animals, not the abstraction that aims to define or describe the essence of the species, genus, family, and so on. We too know our own humanness through self-knowledge and knowledge of other individuals, though we frequently also try to define something essential about our species or its seeming subsets, such as those of gender,

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nationality, and race. The speaker of Hughes’s poem also clearly relies on preconceived notions of kind in watching the jaguar, as indeed we all do when regarding animals. We come to the poem, as we come to any individual animal, filled with ideas of kinds or types—of genre and species. Costello believes that we respond to poetry very differently than to philosophical prose, and she refers to kinds of animal poems, suggesting an unspecified system of grouping poems according to how they reflect the animal. So too in regarding animals, we may think of them as examples of a type within a taxonomic system, as biologists do, or as individual beings, as many people do with their pets. The humananimal distinction that Derrida and Coetzee wish to deconstruct, that many proanimal thinkers and writers decry, is also fundamentally a matter of taxonomy and category.

The problem of taxonomy, the relationship between the individual and the category or categories it belongs to, is central to the study of animals, and to animal studies, as it has been for cultural and discourse studies, modernism, and philosophy in general. It is a form of the ancient problem of the one and the many. What is the one? What is truly indivisible? Presented with examples of the one, of any entity conceived as unique and indivisible, human inquiry has tended to dissolve these examples of seeming distinctness into the multiple and contingent.

Every thing is in fact many things. Deconstruction is a late twentiethcentury form of this impulse to break apart categories that are taken to be essences. On the other hand, philosophy, particularly natural philosophy, also likes to categorize and discover examples of unity in apparent disunity. Recognizing patterns, seeing individual examples as part of some larger group, is a particularly powerful kind of knowledge. A rock, or tree, or bird can appear meaningless until we give it a name that identifies its kind (not just a bird but a gull, not just a gull but a herring gull, and not just a herring gull but the one banded two years ago in Provincetown). These categories can also appear to be a part of the physical world, both in the sense that we have evolved to create taxonomies of the natural world and that life itself depends on the ability of any living individual to recognize members of categories: of the opposite sex, of the same species, of dangerous species, of food, and so on.37

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Yet taxonomists have long recognized the arbitrariness of the patterns they have identified and the names they have given. Darwin’s Origin of Species was an attack on the idea of the fixity of the category of species, since he showed that they are in a constant state of flux, created by shifting populations of generations of individual organisms. Donna Haraway argues that in this tension between the one and the many, the individual and the species, the only reality is one of indeterminacy and change, what she calls “webbed existences.”38 The one doesn’t exist, because the individual is always a community of cells and microorganisms making and taking part in the body on the one hand, and in larger systems and communities on which they depend for sustenance on the other. Though this is true, it is also the case that criticism of any kind must engage in the abstraction of categorization, and this is especially true if we are trying to survey and make sense of a broad collection of individual entities, as I am doing here with a kind of poetry—namely, animal poetry. Haraway herself is fond of the category of dog breeds, a particularly problematic convolution of artifice and nature, human and nonhuman. My topic is poetry about animals, itself a subset of poetry defined by subject rather than by form. Poetry is of course itself a category, one we find easy to identify but nearly impossible to define.

Animals present the problem of categorization in an especially compelling way, in part because animal types, like the category of the animal itself, seem natural, of the physical world rather than our own constructions of it. As children, our ability to distinguish humans from other animals is presumably one of our first acts of knowledge, though so too is the ability to recognize individual parents from among the gaggle of humans who present themselves. The ability to recognize categories of species (such as dog, cat, pig, and horse), the very idea of species, is among the first skills we acquire, or as Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues, one of the first kinds of hardwired knowledge we express. Yet regarding any creature purely or simply as a representative of type creates ethical problems. We demean the individual in understanding a single person or creature primarily as an example of an abstraction. As many animal studies theoreticians have noticed, our schooling about animal types informs and provides language for unethical behavior toward humans.

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We create abstractions about animals, allowing us to ignore their individuality and treat them as “resources” or “pests” or as irrelevant. The subjection of various groups of humans by others is almost always enabled by the ability to categorize those other humans as less than human, as a kind of animal. Racism and sexism are our clearest and most destructive examples of how we subordinate awareness of individual worth to generalized and seemingly biological notions of type. Coetzee argues that in terms of engaging with animals, thinking about them through poetry is better than philosophy precisely because the former tends to engage the individual animal and thus brings us to a moral awareness of the individual rather than the category. “Every living creature fights for its own, individual life, refuses, by fighting, to accede to the idea that the salmon or the gnat is of a lower order of importance than the idea of the salmon or the idea of the gnat. . . . Animals are not believers in ecology.”39 And yet category seems impossible to eliminate, as even Coetzee refers to kinds of animal poetry. And in my attempt to survey animal poetry, I am inevitably confronted not only by the problem of organization but also by the development of an idea of the ideal animal poem, which is itself a category. Approaching poems about animals is like approaching animals themselves in that we can only come to some idea of kinds or categories through individual examples, but we inevitably assess and understand the individual by contrasting it to gradually evolving notions of type. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals suggests the existence of poles along which we might classify and evaluate poetry about animals.

Costello valorizes poetry that represents encounters with individual animals, as opposed to abstracting them into kinds. She also valorizes poems that dwell on the physical being of animals, rather than imagining and portraying their mental life or consciousness. Both of these parameters of categorization arise from her ethical stance toward the lives of animals and her critique of the human valorization of reason and consciousness. However, there are many other possible categories, which I would like to survey briefly.

For my purposes, the least useful but most common criteria for categorizing poetry are the traditional notions of national and authorial

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identity. There are no doubt interesting things to say about these categories as they apply to the field of poems about animals. American, Australian, Canadian, English, and Japanese poems about animals, examined as distinct groups, would presumably reflect some cultural differences in attitudes toward animals and something of the differences of native species themselves. Grouping poems by author reveals the particular experiences, practices, and ethics of the author in relation to animals but inevitably turns the focus on authorial intentions or habits and does not allow us to see the full range of work that poetry about animals can do, or more interestingly, the variety of ways that animals present themselves to human imagination and perception. These two categories (in addition to time period) are so dominant in how literary scholarship organizes and understands poetry that we can barely imagine other categories. I want to explore categories that arise out of the field of writing about animals, and that address how animals present themselves to poetry and what kind of good, or meaning, poetry makes of animals: how, as Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden, animals are “made to carry some portion of our thoughts” and how they “make a world.” 40 Here, then, are some other modes of categorizing animal poems. An appealing mode of categorization, one invoked by both Coetzee and Malamud and central to animal studies in general, is the degree to which a literary animal is allowed to remain itself, an animal, as opposed to becoming a symbol or allegory for something else. At one extreme, you have the animal as allegory or pure symbol—think of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” In the former poem, the actual cat (and its actual death) are ironically and explicitly made to stand for the vanity of women and its dangers. In Shelley’s poem, the bird is disembodied, and the idea of its music becomes an emblem for the poet’s own Platonic aspirations.

The individual animals (the favorite cat, a skylark) are of little apparent concern to the poet, the poem, or the implied reader (though the actual reader may be shocked by the cruelty of Gray’s poem). At the other end of this spectrum we find something like Coetzee’s ideal poem—a poem that somehow registers the reality of the individual animal in and of

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itself, that allows the animal to signify itself or bridges a gap between observer and animal. This is a Platonic ideal—in a sense, it is a lyric with an actual animal speaker, an actual birdsong for instance. But we can allow that some poems express the desire to reach this impossible ideal, while others clearly do not. Poems we might include in this more ideal category, in addition to Hughes’s “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar,” are Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” James Dickey’s “Dog Sleeping at My Feet,” Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” Maxine Kumin’s “Sundays in March,” Christopher Smart’s “For I Consider My Cat Jeoffry,” Robert Penn Warren’s “Caribou,” and James Wright’s “A Blessing.” These are poems of encounter, of a deeply sympathetic attempt by the author or speaker to register the specialness of the individual animal, which I explore in chapter 4.

A means of filling in the gaps between these extremes of animal allegory (which I explore in chapter 1) and the “pure” animal poem is suggested by the taxonomic system itself, with its somewhat mysterious and arbitrary modes of abstraction, beginning (or ending) with the category of the animal and ending (or beginning) with individual specimens who are members of a species, genus, or family. There are a surprisingly large number of poems simply on the animal as a category, including “The Animals,” by Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann. These poems tend to puzzle over the question of human-animal difference and similarity, reminding us that we are animals and what has been gained or lost by our collective failure to remember this fact. Such poems often do the work that Coetzee’s own writing tends to do—to deconstruct difference and blur the boundary between human and animal—though they can also do the opposite, reifying human-animal difference. I explore this kind of poem in chapter 2. Then there are poems about kinds of animals—birds, dogs, horses, snakes, farm animals, and predators—a sort of folk taxonomy, which focus attention on larger orders in nature; I explore these poems in chapter 3. There are poems, like many of those

by Ted Hughes and Pattiann Rogers, that attempt to define the species itself (e.g., “The Tern,” “The Pike,” and “Justification of the Horned Lizard”). Species poems in a sense mimic the interest of science in finding fundamental patterns of life in the natural world, but they rely on a

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sense of the meaning of the species, its distinctness, beauty, and place in the world. Such poems attempt to articulate some essence of the species rather than relying on morphology or genealogy, as biology does. They may involve encounters with specific representatives, but these representatives are understood as examples of the type.

There are of course other concepts one can bring to the taxonomic project. There are lyric poems about animals, often about single encounters with specific animals, and narrative poems, of which there are a wide variety of kinds (making narrative perhaps less useful as a category). Within lyric poems, there are poems that foreground their human speakers and the effect the animal encounter has on them and those in which the human speaker appears almost not to exist (e.g., certain poems

by Gary Snyder and Robert Creeley). There are poems that present the encounter with the animal only in fragments of images or narrative and poems that provide relatively full and complete contexts. There are poems in which animals speak, or rather, in which the author attempts explicitly to ventriloquize or translate animal desire and intention. And there are many poems that are hybrids of categories I have mentioned—the platypus of animal poems—and that defy categorization, even interpretation, a terrific example being James Dickey’s “Sheep Child.” I examine these poems in chapter 5.

Given that there is no obvious system for taxonomizing animal poems, one might rightly wonder what the point of this exercise is. There are also plenty of topical categories one could include, such as zoo poems, hunting poems, pet poems, wild poems, and imagistic poems.

Categories proliferate. Like individual sentient animals, each poem is unique, implying its own distinct category and so effacing category altogether. The practice of poetry thrives because it creates rules and conventions in order that they might be broken, and so one might argue that a paradoxical essence of poetry is a hostility to categories. The problem of organization is central to the project of surveying poetry about animals, and to answering the fundamental question of what good poetry can do, and has done, for the animal and what good the animal— and individual animals—has done for poetry. The usual solution has been to write on poets who have written animal poems, which necessarily

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foregrounds and privileges the poets themselves. I want to foreground and privilege the field of poems about animals. I practice a mode of criticism that respects the individual poem and animal, that can give careful readings of the poem—an analog for close observation of the individual animal—and that can pay attention to, and find meaning in, notions of genre and kind. This is a flexible and even hybrid mode of criticism that can do justice to the wide-ranging abilities of poetry to create and reveal our engagement with animals and our conceptions of them. Focusing on the categories through which we perceive the animal presents category itself as a part of our interpretive process—that we make sense of animals (read them) by categorizing them, and that these categories have both cultural (human) and natural (biological) realities. It seems natural to allow these categories of taxonomy to infiltrate my schema for surveying and reading poems about animals. Doing so allows me to answer as thoughtfully as possible the fundamental question of what a careful reading of poetry about animals can teach us about the way we have regarded animals.

Chapter 1 is about animal allegory. I note that the earliest poetry about animals tends to be allegorical—that is, the animal stands in for self-evidently human concerns. However, interpretation of most animal poems, regardless of when they were written, tends to turn them into allegories. Indeed, any poem about an animal may be read allegorically if a reader is insistent that all poems must be ultimately or wholly about the human. I argue that even early allegories are concerned with, and reflect, something of the actual animal, and that readers of animal poems of all kinds need to resist the easy strategy of reading through the poem to find the allegory, to see language as always solipsistic. This chapter explores and defines the fuzzy boundaries of the animal poem and establishes that there is a tradition (or evolution) of poetry about animals.

Chapter 2 moves from poems that allegorize animals (or the animal) to those that are in some way about animality, or animals as opposed to humans. It is a paradox that we can so easily use and accept the animal as a category (as in animal studies and animal rights) given our awareness of the complexity and variety of life, and that the category obscures

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our own status as animals. Beyond the scientific uses of the category of the animal, why do we need or imagine it? While Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida make the case that the category exists to separate humanity and philosophy from the natural world, this is only one reason among many. Poems imagine, imply, and figure the category of the animal in many different ways with different effects and meanings.

Writing a poem that figures the category of the animal can have the effect of distancing humanity from the community of nonhuman animals, to see that community as other and strange. Or the poem can identify the community as a group deserving of attention and care.

Or it can idealize or de-idealize animals or humans. Animals as a group can be figured concretely or abstractly, through examples of many of them, or by simply speaking directly about “the animals” (the title of a surprising number of poems).

Chapter 3 examines poems that attempt to define specific animal species, which I find to be the most numerous class. This is not surprising, since we so commonly identify other animals as types or kinds, rather than as individuals. One definition of the animal may well be those creatures we recognize as belonging to or constituting a type rather than a collection of individuals. Type produces its own hermeneutics; like the notion of genre in literature, kind in the biological realm is always an abstraction from actual (individual) examples. The concept of species does not simply invite definition but requires it. Just so, biologists have long worked at defining the crucial features of biological kinds and have attempted to order all of creation based on resemblance and difference. Poetry’s definitions are frequently informed by science but do vastly different work. I examine this class of poetry critically, making sense of both the pleasures of species identification and its limitations.

In chapter 4 I read those poems that attempt to approach, recognize, and speak to and for individual animals. These are in a sense the most romantic of the animal poems and have been idealized by some critics as the most morally serious, while decried by others as suffering from anthropomorphic delusion. I explore what is at stake in approaching the individual animal. What can a poem do to imagine the boundary between a human and a single other creature? Why is this desire—to

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encounter and perhaps understand another nonhuman being—so powerful? Part of my argument is that the self-conscious creation of the lyric moment allows poets to invent forms of contact that can shape and feed our sympathy.

Chapter 5 is on hybridity, on poems about mixing animal kinds, imagining human-animal crossings, and mixing forms. While the other types of poems I examine imply an idealization of the very idea of type— of an essence of animal, human, species, or even individual—poems on hybridity complicate and undermine these other categories. I discuss the idea of hybridity, its biological roots, its appeal to poets, and the various kinds of work that recognizing and imagining hybridity can do. On the one hand, I see these poems as a substantial and important body of work, a consistent way of thinking about the meaning of animals. After all, animals reproduce, mutate, and cross both naturally and as a result of human control and experimentation. On the other hand, these poems are by definition resistant to classification and abstraction and thus call into question taxonomies of all kinds, including the one I am suggesting for this book. I think of this chapter as my own explicit acknowledgment of the limitations of categorization, of the remainders left out by the taxonomy of animal poetry I build toward in the other chapters. It helps to prove the case, I hope, that there is an inevitable tension between ideas of category and their tendency to dissolve, the many and the one.

Praise for

POeTrY aNd ANiMaLs “Onno Oerlemans’s Poetry and Animals represents an important contribution to the scholarship on animals and human-animal relations in literature. We badly need some excellent work on poetry from a human-animal studies perspective, and this book provides a provocative, erudite, thoughtful, and engaging contribution.”

—Philip Armstrong, author of What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity “Oerlemans interrogates how poetry, as a specific form of writing, ‘reveals tendrils of meaning about animals that other kinds of writing and thinking do not.’ His astonishing close readings of choice examples illuminate how poetry sustains a productive ambiguity and openness in the representation—which always involves interpretation—of animals.

Great for anyone teaching, writing about, or even just trying to pay attention to animals.”

—Susan McHugh, University of New England “Animals are present in many poems and key to the development of poetic form, yet relatively little has been written about their formative place in poetry. Poetry and Animals redresses the lack of attention to poetry within animal studies and highlights the essential role of our fellow creatures in the history of poetry.”

—Anat Pick, Queen Mary University of London

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York cup.columbia.edu PRINTED IN THE USA

ISBN: 978-0-231-15954-8

9 780231 159548